The invention relates to electronic devices, and more particularly to wireless communication.
Demand for wireless information services via cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and Internet appliances (IA) plus wireless networking among notebook computers is rapidly growing. Various protocols for wireless communication have been proposed, including the WCDMA for cellular systems, Bluetooth for local wireless networking at moderate data rates and low cost, and 802.11 for wireless networking at high data rates (e.g., 20 Mbps). WCDMA has both time division duplex (TDD) and frequency division duplex (FDD) modes of operation; Bluetooth uses slow frequency hopping over roughly 30–80 1-MHz channels but in a TDD mode of alternate master and slave transmissions, and 802.11 has carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) which is a TDD-like mode of two or more devices using the same channel at different times.
In a TDD system a pair of devices communicating may called a master and a slave and the transmission from master to slave termed the downlink and the transmission from the slave to the master termed the uplink. The master can estimate the channel between the master and slave by analysis of received signals from the slave, and the master can then use such estimates to adjust features of its transmissions, such as code rate, power, information rate, antenna weight adjustment, and so forth. However, the master measures the uplink channel rather than the needed downlink channel. As illustrated in FIG. 2, the uplink channel is composed of the slave power amplifier followed by the physical channel followed by the low noise amplifier of the master; in contrast, the downlink channel is composed of the master power amplifier followed by the physical channel followed by the low noise amplifier of the slave. Although there are many gains and phase shifts associated with all the elements in both the master and slave for both the transmitting and receiving front ends, FIG. 2 lumps these factors generally as “power amplifier” and “low noise amplifier”.
The master needs the downlink channel estimate to maximize the throughput of its transmissions to the slave (for example, to use TxAA or STD). It is not easy to match the attenuations and phase shifts in the master and slave amplifiers, and so the channel measured by the master (the uplink channel) will be different than the one the master will use for transmission (the downlink channel) as shown in FIG. 2. This is a problem for current systems.